Fall Back, Slip Down, Fade
by littlebirds
Summary: Left alone to hunt for Dark things, they fare none to well without her. Drabble series.
1. Chapter 1

**Standard Disclaimer. Thanks.**

Just a little drabble series inspired by a question posed by chelseyb1010 over at the TL.

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He wakes to a day off-kilter, wrong at its heart. He can tell by the quality of the light- bright through the canvas, mid-day light- filtering past the fine, red veins branching through his eyelids. Outside, the crackle of dead leaves, footsteps- fast, too fast-and Ron huffing. Harry holds his breath, listening, as the hot, sour air of the tent presses against his face. She's never let them lie in like this, before. He digs his fingers into the edge of the mattress, pulls himself up as he opens his eyes.

Ron bursts through the canvas, the skin around his mouth mushroom grey, the frayed edges of his jeans brushing the tops of his bare feet. He barrels forward, left shoulder leading.

"Did she wake you?" His voice is leaden, accusatory. Today has picked up where yesterday left off. Harry huffs out the breath he's been holding. Noon-time or not, it's too early for this shit.

"No. _You_ woke me crashing about…" Harry begins, but Ron lifts his hand, dashing the words away.

"Did she tell you she was going off?" Ron's voice thickens, drops, falls apart on the last two syllables. Harry looks up, then follows Ron's gaze to her bunk. The familiar feeling churns up his throat. Panic. So dense Harry has to work his body around it. He makes his hands throw off the blanket, makes his feet and legs stand. He lurches past Ron to get outside, looking for what he doesn't know. A trail of bread crumbs? A streak of branch tips tied with short lengths of yellow string? He follows the path crushed into the leaves once, then twice, stopping every few steps, peering deep into the trees.

Thicket, branch, and vine stretch and reach. The forest tangles, constricting around him.

Hermione is gone.


	2. -two-

Night falls. Ron over-feeds the fire, nursing it with large branches until it threatens to lap up the tent and steal the air from their lungs. Harry slumps against the canvas, watching smoke pirouette from the blackening toes of his boots. Tomorrow, he'll knock baked seed husks and clumps of ash from his hair, but tonight it's best to stay out here, burning, back turned to the shrine she left at the centre of her bunk.

A purse. A locket. A thumb-worn book of faerie tales. A cluster of Girl Things on a faded blue blanket. They slouch around it, two wary pilgrims. Harry can't look. He tries, but the tableau twists and blurs, swims behind pale, watery forms. He calls it spectral interference.

They slog through three vague days. Ron says, "We should take off, soon," and tumbles another log into the shoulder-high inferno. Their nightly beacons fail to draw her, but, like any fresh habit, there's still comfort in the ritual.

Harry holds out his hands, lets the flames fork around his fingertips.

"In the morning," he says.

Inside, he watches the glimmer of her imprint from his pillow. Brief arcs of light, visible only in the early hours after the fire burns out, skim across the places where knees knelt and knuckles bent, where parted lips passed breath as she lay down all she thought they needed.

_This, and this. _

_And this._

The locket she left last. It sits before everything, a glint of marigold yellow in the corner of his eye.

Finally lifting the chain from the mattress, Harry's taken back at the chill biting through the numb pads of his fingers. And it's just another item added to the list of Things Lost, Now She's Gone: The heat of her skin, coiled in his hand.


	3. -three-

"And what of the Mudblood? Run off, I see. Or, perhaps, left behi…"

The gilded frame clatters against Ron's boot and the portrait of Phineas Nigellus tips face-down, raising a rectangle of dust and stifled protests over the cabbage roses patterning the rug. Harry flicks a cursory glance over their morning's work. Shoulder-deep in the vast cavity of the bag, the last few vials skitter from under his fingers.

Blocks of paraphernalia spread like a ramshackle city between them. Ron towers over it all, face blank, a detached, appraising god. From his place on the floor, Harry watches, waits for a crack in the mask- a fast blink at the lace hem of an undershirt, a grimace over the box of tampons. Maybe a good, hard swallow at the turned handles of the birch needles jutting from the tangled rainbow of yarn.

Finally, there's a furrow between the brows. Ron says, "Where's _Hogwarts: A History_?"

And Harry looks, but...

"Fucking hell," Ron says. And then he laughs- the flimsiest sound Harry has ever heard- but still, suddenly, Harry is laughing, too. And it feels terrible, this noise spurting from his throat, but he can't stop because Ron's bending over, he's swiping a handful of knickers from the floor and he's lifting them up, and the elastic strings that held them around her hips are waving like antenna searching the vibrations of the air, and Ron says, "Fucking hell," again, and they're both laughing so hard they can't breathe, laughing so hard it feels like a fist to the heart, over and over, and then Ron's hand sinks. His fingers loosen. The knickers drop to the floor.

And Ron stops laughing.

He covers his face with both hands, lets out a noise grown boys shouldn't make, then turns and pushes his way out of the tent.

Harry stares across all the books that aren't _Hogwarts: A History_, and, even as he swipes at his eyes, he knows they hardly have reason to act so affronted.

_I don't think I'd feel right if I didn't have it... _

Isn't that what she said?


End file.
